2 ms·

Mind if I asked why it was extraordinarily ambitious?

• michaelchisari 16y ago
  Well, at the time (2004), it was extremely unexplored territory. Social networks themselves were almost brand new, and the idea of creating a distributed, open source one was almost unheard of. The nearest project (DiSo) didn't show up for two years after that. Also, my intention quickly became more than just a social networking app, and I really wanted to turn it into a framework for social apps. So that brought up all kinds of issues of MVC framework design and how to build an API and other large architectural issues. Not to mention that a lot of the project I've had to do myself, with both very little precedence, and very little help (comparatively). Some of that was my fault, for not being better at documentation and project management, but I also learned that soliciting help for open source projects is a lot harder than The Cathedral and The Bazaar made it out to be. It's easier now, that the groundwork has been set, and there are competing projects I can look at and learn from, but the first few years of flying blind was a hell of a crash course.